Robert Bresson Susan Sontag - Essay

Susan Sontag

In the film, the master of the reflective mode is Robert Bresson. (p. 178)

The reason that Bresson is not generally ranked according to his merits is that the tradition to which his art belongs, the reflective or contemplative, is not well understood. Particularly in England and America, Bresson's films are often described as cold, remote, overintellectualized, geometrical. (p. 179)

[Bresson, like Yasujiro Ozu, has created a rigorous narrative form.] And the form of Bresson's films is designed (like Ozu's) to discipline the emotions at the same time that it arouses them: to induce a certain tranquillity in the spectator, a state of spiritual balance that is itself the subject of the...